The Best Kind of Payback

Check out this remarkable testimonial from Gail Dalton, M.D., who volunteered for RFB&D decades ago and is now mother to a teenage daughter with a learning disability. This comes courtesy of our friends at Camp Academia, a Georgia-based educational consulting firm which believes that all children's learning experiences can be enriched.Date: 28 June 2010Recording for the Blind and DyslexicTo Whom It May Concern:
Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic is an organization that has come in and out of my adult life in various ways since 1977. During my college years at the University of Wisconsin, I joined the Delta Gamma Sorority, whose philanthropic service was to support the blind. Throughout my four years there, I participated in many fundraisers to support the blind, and spent a number of hours reading books into an old tape recording machine to provide audio books to the blind. Little did I know that the Recording for the Blind organization, now RFB&D, would pay me back a hundred times over with my own child in the years to come.
My daughter, now 14, has an auditory and visual language processing disorder. Many years were spent trying to diagnose and understand her specific learning disability; but once recognized, I kept being referred to the organization. Eventually, we came to understand that while only 50 percent of what my daughter was reading was getting into her long-term memory, nearly 100 percent of what she was reading could be retained in her long-term memory if visual and auditory reading were performed simultaneously.
At first, my daughter resisted listening to the books out loud while reading. It was a struggle just to get her to try the Daisy recorder -- after all, someone might see that it wasn't an I-Pod! But it didn't take long for her to realize that her grades soared when she listened and read simultaneously, and quickly dropped when she stopped doing both together.
RFB&D has provided us with a variety of material that we couldn't get anywhere else. We are so grateful for their existence This year, all the services were even free -- as if just getting the material wasn't enough of a gift.
I am so grateful to RFB&D. They are an organization providing indispensable services to a variety of people with disabilities. They are an easy organization to work with, and I recommend them highly.
Sincerely,
Gail P. Dalton, MD